By evolution, are you talking about the process of evolution itself (which I wholeheartedly believe is an accurate observation) or are you talking about how evolution has impacted humans (ie are we really descended from monkeys, etc.)?

The actual process that evolution represents I feel is an accurate one (genetic mutation, natural selection, etc.); however, I am not sure about the prospect of a last universal ancestor from which all life is descended. I am also not sure about how humans fit into the process, and coming from a religion that believes man was made by God, it just adds to the confusion.

I believe a creative Source was first, is foremost, and eternal, but with that said, I also believe in evolution. You plant a seed and it grows into a plant, tree, or creature. You focus on internal change and your old friends and associates no longer recognize who you have become. We were created to recognize our own beauty, and I think that is what evolution is - a moving picture of us towards our perfection.

From a more humanesque view, as physical beings, we learn and change internally and externally constantly, but our spiritual essence or soul is perfect, we just lost sight of it and evolution is helping us return to the understanding of our perfection.

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"Spirit is in a state of grace forever.Your reality is only spirit.Therefore you are in a state of grace forever."

"As relfections of the Source, we are little gods."

"...part of me doesn't want to believe that auto-eroticism while crushing on a doodle (sigil) could manifest a check in the mail box, but hey, it did."

Evolution isn't about belief. Science is not about belief. It's about people who don't know, and are doing their best to find and figure it out, or at least it should be.

I don't see why politics or culture should have charged the "evolution meme" with an agenda other than sharing with us plebes something that happens in too big a perspective for many of us to care, but I appreciate this explanation as to a mystery of nature.

Sometimes it isn't appropriate, like I used to be a huge fan of evolutionary psychology until I saw how problematic it was from the standpoint of kyriarchy. Not everyone is there, and that point that is there shouldn't be everywhere.

But generally I like it.

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Here is a story that I believe.

Once we were blobs in the sea, and then fishes, and then lizards and rats, and then monkeys, and hundreds of things in between. This hand was once a fin. This hand once had claws.

In my human mouth I have the pointy teeth of a wolf and the chisel teeth of a rabbit and the grinding teeth of a cow.

Our blood is as salty as the sea we used to live in.

When we’re frightened, the hair on our skins stands up, just like when we had fur. We are history!

Everything we’ve ever been on the way to becoming us, we still are.

I’m made up of the memories of my parents and grandparents, all my ancestors. They’re in the way I look, in the color of my hair.

And I’m made up of everyone I’ve ever met who’s changed the way I think.

Evolution is clear to me, I believe in an original divine creator, but we evolve not just biologically, and mentally but spiritually every day. I think it is the way of things, to ever evolve yet stay the same, a grand contradiction and confusion that I have yet to understand.

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Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn. -CS LewisCultivation to the mind is as necessary as food to the body. - Marcus T Cicero

By evolution, are you talking about the process of evolution itself (which I wholeheartedly believe is an accurate observation) or are you talking about how evolution has impacted humans (ie are we really descended from monkeys, etc.)?

The actual process that evolution represents I feel is an accurate one (genetic mutation, natural selection, etc.); however, I am not sure about the prospect of a last universal ancestor from which all life is descended. I am also not sure about how humans fit into the process, and coming from a religion that believes man was made by God, it just adds to the confusion.

I was talking about the whole theory about how humans come from a common ancestor of monkeys and the evolution that happens to a species over millions of years through natural selection.

I think it's fascinating that the theory of evolution states that every living creature came from one single organism.

Well, the matter of that organism came from aside, the whole process makes a lot of sense. When organisms reproduce, sometimes the resulting organisms may have differing genetic codes. The process repeats itself, with organisms with adaptations unsuited to the environment dying out, ad infinitum.

I still don't really understand how the transition form prokaryotes to eukaryotes and other big jumps worked though. I'll have to do a lot more reading on biology.

Mastery does not occur when you've performed a feat once or twice. Instead, it comes after years of training, when you realize that you no longer notice when you're performing a feat which used to require so much effort. Even walking takes years of training for a human: why not everything else?

It's just amazing to think that every organism came from one single organism.

Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling, and how everything is made of the same basic atomic structures to become even more multifaceted atomic structures... but quantum physics isn't the same as evolution. I wonder how, or if, particle physics relates to evolution

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"Spirit is in a state of grace forever.Your reality is only spirit.Therefore you are in a state of grace forever."

"As relfections of the Source, we are little gods."

"...part of me doesn't want to believe that auto-eroticism while crushing on a doodle (sigil) could manifest a check in the mail box, but hey, it did."

If you've dropped anything on the ground, and call that habit "gravity" then it's easy to know rather than believe.

Evolution is something sophisticated and bigger. Not everybody looks at their opposable thumb and just knows that it came from millions of years of living cells happening to work together and then work better with the environment that they're in.

Rather than gravity, it's more like... Do you believe in the cosmological constant that prevents all the planets crashing into each other, or do you believe that the universe is expanding at a rate that renders the cosmological constant moot? It's like, as long as the planets don't crash into one another and kill us all, or unless that's an imminent threat we can do something about with such knowledge, then why would most laypeople care enough to believe in it?

I'm guessing you asked this question to make us realize that you are pretty idiotic if you don't believe in scientific fact.

Something like that. But also to draw another scientific parallel between the two.

See, despite the experiential understanding of gravity that every layman can pick up on, and how humans have long known intuitively that we're "rooted" to the Earth because of it, it wasn't until Sir Isaac Newton that it was seriously studied as a scientific endeavor (Galileo studied it too, but it didn't take off among the rest of the scientific community at that time).

Evolution, on the other hand, was accepted as a natural (or divine) thing at least as long ago as the Greeks. But it also didn't receive serious scientific study until around the time of Darwin and his Theory of Evolution (or at least, that's what teachers of today credit as being the serious start of that thread of scientific inquiry).

Like the original theories of gravity, the original theories of evolution weren't entirely correct. However, it was with study and experimentation that information was gleaned and theories were updated, again and again, enhancing one another towards the path of understanding.

It is scientific fact that evolution happens. It has been proven time and again in selective breeding experiments. It is not up for serious debate among any scientific circle that puts their science before their religion. And thus, yes, to not believe in at least the basic concept of evolution, as the concept that animals species change over time and that genetic variations occur through both mutations and genetic selection over time, is about as silly as not believing in the basic concept of gravity, as the concept that masses attract one another for some odd reason.

So I don't mean to derail your thread and make it sound like the question is kind of moot, because it's not. It's always okay to ask why people do or don't think or believe the things that they do.

~Steve

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Mastery does not occur when you've performed a feat once or twice. Instead, it comes after years of training, when you realize that you no longer notice when you're performing a feat which used to require so much effort. Even walking takes years of training for a human: why not everything else?

I'm guessing you asked this question to make us realize that you are pretty idiotic if you don't believe in scientific fact.

Something like that. But also to draw another scientific parallel between the two.

See, despite the experiential understanding of gravity that every layman can pick up on, and how humans have long known intuitively that we're "rooted" to the Earth because of it, it wasn't until Sir Isaac Newton that it was seriously studied as a scientific endeavor (Galileo studied it too, but it didn't take off among the rest of the scientific community at that time).

Evolution, on the other hand, was accepted as a natural (or divine) thing at least as long ago as the Greeks. But it also didn't receive serious scientific study until around the time of Darwin and his Theory of Evolution (or at least, that's what teachers of today credit as being the serious start of that thread of scientific inquiry).

Like the original theories of gravity, the original theories of evolution weren't entirely correct. However, it was with study and experimentation that information was gleaned and theories were updated, again and again, enhancing one another towards the path of understanding.

It is scientific fact that evolution happens. It has been proven time and again in selective breeding experiments. It is not up for serious debate among any scientific circle that puts their science before their religion. And thus, yes, to not believe in at least the basic concept of evolution, as the concept that animals species change over time and that genetic variations occur through both mutations and genetic selection over time, is about as silly as not believing in the basic concept of gravity, as the concept that masses attract one another for some odd reason.

So I don't mean to derail your thread and make it sound like the question is kind of moot, because it's not. It's always okay to ask why people do or don't think or believe the things that they do.

~Steve

I don't believe you derailed this thread at all. I think you contributed a lot to this topic so thanks